I have adventured in reading this classic novel, and I’m glad that it was short enough to ease the pain quickly. My little review on #Goodreads:

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Horrible. Tedious to death. An awful drag…at least it was short and the pain lasted only a week.

The story of an idiotic, spineless scientist who manages to create life (!), but then immediately rejects and abandons the creature because…it’s ugly. Then he faints, an awful number of times throughout the too many pages of this terribly self-indulgent teenager disaster. What a waste of time, really. Kenneth Branagh did an amazing job in ameliorating this story in his movie.

Victor is so irrational to never really use his brain at all, he’s all emotion and psychosis, sees something, gets scared and faints, then he falls sick, for two-three months. And he whines about how he’s pitiful, unlucky, suffering and blah blah blah. He makes idiotic choices and never faces his responsibilities, he can only blame the creature.

The book is also very illogical, and relies too much on very convenient coincidences. I’m not writing spoilers, but the story almost made me sometimes scream with desperation!

The narrative is so horribly self-indulgent that we have to read up to 4 pages of useless scenery description, which could be easily condensed in one page just for the setting.
But no, you need to know the colour of the tree’s leaves in that particular season, and right when you were finally acquiring some momentum, hoping in something to happen, the rhythm is broken again.
And when action happens, Victor usually faints. Then he wakes up after two months in bed, and then he whines some more. Then also the creature whines. And the ship’s captain whines too. Everybody whines, including the poor reader.

It’s incredible how such a brilliant premise, with all the influence it carried (and still carries) on literature and popular culture, including a number of undertones and legitimate questions about the power and dangers of science, got wasted on this poor execution.
At least I’ve learned a new English word: “countenance”. Beware, you’ll read it a lot, REALLY an awful lot of times!



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